On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 1:11 PM, Antony Courtney <antony.courtney@gmail.com> wrote:

A 2-D vector graphics library such as Java2D ( or Quartz on OS/X or
GDI+ on Windows ) supports things like computing tight bounding
rectangles for arbitrary shapes, hit testing for determining whether a
point is inside or outside a shape and constructive area geometry for
shape compositing and clipping without dropping down to a raster
representation.

These are the kinds of capabilities provided by Cairo, which is very pleasant to use (PDF-style imaging model) and quite portable. There are already Cairo bindings provided by gtk2hs, too.